Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2023-24 edition Ask a direct question about this edition of the book — who, how many, how common, which group more — and it is answered with a table computed on this page from the edition’s index: the season line, height and age, the on-ice percentiles, the grades and the traits read out of every report. Ask for a view on named players — what a comparison comes down to, what makes a man — and you get the book’s reading of their own pages, and only those. The model turns your question into a query and phrases the result, or reads the pages it is handed; it never originates a figure, and an answer carrying a figure that is on neither the table nor the pages is withheld. It does not forecast, and it says so when a question is outside what the book holds.

Tables are computed on this page from the 2023-24 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
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41

Spencer Martin

Columbus Blue Jackets Goaltender

The worst save percentage in the league last season, and the best one the season before.

SeasonTeamGPWLOTLGAGAASOSASV%
2016-17COL3021134.35096.865
2021-22VAN6303111.740218.950
2022-23VAN29111511073.990830.871
2023-24 so far——————————
Career—38141751313.6301144.885

This Season So Far

The 2023-24 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.

Last Season

29 games for Vancouver, 11-15-1, .8711 — the lowest save percentage of any goaltender in the league who played 25 games — with a 3.99 average on 830 shots.

The season before, in six appearances for the same club, he posted .9495. That is the entire reason he was given 29 games, and it is a six-game sample.

Three NHL seasons, 38 games in total: .8646, .9495 and .8711. There is no trend in that, only variance, and the variance is enormous.

The Finesse Game

6-3 and 191. The positioning is sound and unremarkable; he is square to the puck and does not scramble.

What the record shows is that he does not steal games and does not survive volume. He faced 28.6 shots a night across 29 appearances, and nothing in his technique creates margin when the club in front of him does not.

The rebound control is ordinary. So is everything else, which at this level is the problem rather than a description.

The Intangibles

63rd overall in 2013 to Colorado, and a decade in the American league punctuated by three brief NHL runs.

Columbus signed him after the worst statistical season any starting goaltender had. On a roster whose crease produced .8763 and .8920 that is either an act of desperation or a bet that the .9495 was closer to the truth, and this book cannot tell which.

Between him and Merzlikins, Columbus have on their roster the two worst save percentages posted in the National Hockey League last season — one of them earned in Vancouver.

What kind of player

The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.

  • ordinaryraised, and called ordinary

Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.

  • rebound-controlpresent and ordinary· where the second chance ends up

    “The rebound control is ordinary.”